


i wear your greatness on my spine (i'd like to steal your words, i'd like to give you mine)

by restlesslikeme



Category: Iron Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom, The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, F/M, Getting Together, Parenthood, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-04
Updated: 2013-04-04
Packaged: 2017-12-07 11:46:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/748168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/restlesslikeme/pseuds/restlesslikeme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Still- hers is a love that levels cities. It crushes and burns and breaks in its all encompassing glory.</p><p>(Her body is a plague. Her feelings are a weapon.)</p><p>She's working on soft touches and lullabies. She's relearning gentleness. Zephyr smiles and it feels like deliverance, so maybe there's something in this too, maybe this is good.</p><p>--</p><p>In which, against all odds, Bryce Banner finds herself a mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i wear your greatness on my spine (i'd like to steal your words, i'd like to give you mine)

**Author's Note:**

> did someone tell you i could write non-achey bruce banner fic? someone lied. possibly set in the same verse as [my other rule 63!bruce fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/593410), though not necessarily.

"He has your eyes" Tony says, his voice a soft warm breath against the side of her neck.

Bryce is crying before the words have time to register.

 

\--

 

She doesn't think she's ever seen anything so tiny when he's born.

He comes early and he's frail; his limbs look too long for his body, even all curled in tight against himself. His hands clench into delicate fists, but when she runs a fingertip over his miniscule knuckles they release, unbend.

He spends weeks in an incubator that has Stark Industries stamped onto the side, fighting a war against the poison in his own blood stream.

Bryce's body is a plague, a physical manifestation of destruction, a colloseum dedicated to violence. Her ribs are cracked concrete and blood and glass sticks to her eyelashes. Her hips are a warzone- her child is a refugee by birthright.

She waits to see if he will be able to pull himself up out of the rubble. She waits to see if anything could ever survive existing within the devastated landscape that she is.

 

\--

 

He does.

She calls him Zephyr because it’s gentle and she is tired of forced strength.

 

\--

 

When Tony crawls into her bed, she lets him. When he cards his fingers through her hair, she lets him. He presses his mouth to the top knotch of her spine, and she lets him.

Zephyr shifts against her chest and she brings a hand up to cradle his head, her palm barely resting against him, visions of crushing him too close to ignore. There's a lurch in her stomach, and she presses her eyes shut tighter.

She feels rather than hears Tony suck in a breath. He rests a hand on her hip, and she lets him.

When she wakes up in the morning he’s gone.

 

\--

 

And sure, he has Bryce's eyes but he’s got Tony's jawline. Tony's mouth. Nobody says anything about it, not even them.

 

\--

 

Bryce loves him. She loves him so much that it terrifies her, so much that sometimes it's the only thing she knows. It feels like losing control, she has to remember that after she closes her eyes and counts to ten she'll still be herself.

Still- hers is a love that levels cities. It crushes and burns and breaks in its all encompassing glory.

(Her body is a plague. Her feelings are a weapon.)

She's working on soft touches and lullabies. She's relearning gentleness. Zephyr smiles and it feels like deliverance, so maybe there's something in this too, maybe this is good.

"You’ve got a knack for that, you know."

Tony doesn’t touch either of them. She wishes he would. He hovers in the doorway and watches instead. There’s a little bit of both of those things in the way he stands; she’s been noticing it for a while. A vicious love but a gentle one too. He won’t touch Zephyr unless she initiates but his hands tremble when he does and sometimes she remembers how those hands felt taking her apart and putting her back together again.

 

\--

 

She wonders if he’ll turn out like her and spends extra time pressing him close, hoping it might make a difference. She knows better now than to think that it was just the accident (incident, explosion) that changed everything, but humans are fallible and unpredictable. There’s nothing to say that something she does might not trigger something later in life.

 

\--

 

Tony tells him fairytales, she hears his voice through the walls.

 

\--

 

“You’re good at this too,” she says, but Tony laughs her off, dry and humorless and sad.

That night she gathers Zephyr up and crawls into Tony’s bed instead. The baby squirms between them, turning his head back and forth, and Tony is half asleep, barely aware of what’s going on.

“What are you doing, Doc,” his voice is gravelly and Zephyr coos at the sound of it.

She rests a hand on his hip, and he lets her. 

In the morning she’s still there.

 

\--

 

She dreams about wires and blue light. She dreams about blood on her hands and being wrist-deep in Tony’s chest.

She dreams about taking him apart and putting him together again until she knows him inside and out, until his electricity buzzes through her fingertips like an old friend, until neither of them have any reason to be afraid of the other. 

In her dream he holds her face and kisses her as she slots his supernova heart back into place, her palms still sticky.

 

\--

 

“What do you want?” Bryce says.

But the room is empty and she doesn’t know who she’s asking anymore.

 

\--

 

Tony doesn’t touch either of them, but she wishes he would. She catches him lingering in the hallway around Zephyr’s room more than once, and there are bags under his eyes. She stares at his mouth, at the set of his jaw. She drags fingers over his wrist whenever he passes her and realizes they’ve switched roles.

 

\--

 

Zephyr keeps getting bigger. He cries more and grabs at whatever he can and Bryce hates to not have him with her at all times. He’s paler than she is; his veins are spindly blue roots all through his arms, full of life and beginnings. She can kiss his shoulders without feeling like she’ll break him, most of the time.

A light projector shows up in his room, covering his walls in planets and stars, every detail precise. She names them all for him, her own kind of fairytale, and when he’s fast asleep she watches his chest rise and fall.

She doesn’t understand how something so good came from her, out of her, but she’s starting to accept it, slowly.

Tony’s lab is one floor down and his security system is easy to pass through.

“He liked the stars,” she says, coming up behind him, and he doesn’t start but he does smile a little, briefly.

“Good, Doc. His room was too boring. Like a hospital, what were you thinking?”

She laughs and he smiles a little wider. When she pulls up old blueprints from what feels like ages ago and starts to tinker, he doesn’t try to question it.

 

\--

 

Tony crawls into her bed and she lets him.

How many times have they done this?

His hands are warm and careful along the plane of her back (and when has he ever been careful? it’s making her nostalgic), he noses at the nape of her neck. She turns over to meet him, tucking herself close, catching his fingers up with hers when he tries to slide them away.

“I miss you,” says Tony, secret and quiet in the dark. “Bryce.”

His lips are chapped when she presses her mouth there, dry like the calluses on his fingers that he threads through her dark hair. This part comes like clockwork, always, like they were made to do it.

The first time he kissed she tasted violence on his tongue and understood; his body is a ruin too, he knows what it means to have armageddon lining your bones.

She kisses him until he isn’t careful anymore, until he’s digging his nails into the constellations of scars on her stomach, her thighs. She tells him she misses him with her teeth on his collarbone and breathes in the smell of sweat and engine oil. She lets it fill her lungs until he’s all there is, and when she exhales she’s smiling and he’s still there.

In the morning she wakes up to Zephyr babbling to himself in the room next door, and Tony’s arm wrapped around her middle.

 

\--

 

Zephyr falls asleep so easily for Tony it’s almost unfair.

“At least we know who his favourite is,” Bryce muses, glancing at the two of them from her work station. 

Tony scoffs, hitching the sleeping baby up higher on his shoulder. Zeph’s got hair now, dark moppy curls that match his eyes, and a strand of it is stuck to the side of Tony’s face.

“I’m everyone’s favourite,” he says, waving her off with his free hand. “I’m obviously your favourite, my merch sells more than our good captain’s does-”

“I don’t think that’s actually true,” Bryce interjects mildly. “Especially when you take into account all the vintage posters, comics...”

“I’m _saying_ he’s got good taste.”

Zephyr yawns into Tony’s neck, and he rubs his back, and it’s sweet, so Bryce lets it lie.

 

\--

 

Bryce lies on the floor next to Zephyr’s crib and stares up at the stars. She touches her own chest, just below her collarbone, and listens to her heart beat take her into tomorrow. She lets it remind her that she’s a woman, as well as a war. She lets it remind her that she didn’t die in that house with a man who was supposed to be her father, didn’t die in the burst of light that should have taken her apart.

_“Maybe you’ll find out”_

Zephyr breathes soundly and evenly a few feet above her.

Tony comes in around three am and sits next to her, drawing her up so that her head rests in his lap.

“He shouldn’t have made it,” she says softly. “He shouldn’t have even been possible.”

Tony strokes her hair and leans back against the crib, letting his eyes rest shut.

“His parents have got a long history of cheating that kind of shit,” he answers. “He’s just carrying on the tradition.”

She doesn’t say anything, but likes how it sounds. His parents.

“Go to sleep, Doctor Banner.”

When the sun comes through the blinds to warm her face, they’re both still there.

**Author's Note:**

> Zephyr means a cool, gentle breeze.


End file.
